Writing begins as tedious cataloguing, as a listing of who is where, who traded what with whom, and so on. In the Icelandic case, the most important thing to register was the correspondence between a given family name and a given plot of land. This project eventually issued in the famous Landnámabók or Book of Settlements, an early-11th-century text outlining the claims of the original settler families to their parcels of land.

But lists of names, at least potentially, are the tables-of-contents of stories about the people behind the names, and in the case of Iceland there seems to have been a sort of gradual evolution of these stories out of the original list: an inheritance feud among the descendants of Egill Skalagrímmson; Gunar Hámundarson attends the Alþing; etc. In a sense, Icelandic history continues to be perceived by Icelanders, or at least packaged by them for outsiders, as a sort of continual unfolding from these registries of settlements.

Let’s re-imagine how we can better build digital systems to support narratives that can be used to teach, instruct, and begin discussions.

Natural Language Understanding requires a large amount of background "common sense" knowledge about the situation under discussion. In many respects, using this knowledge is at the core of reasoning and acting in traditional Artificial Intelligence. When reading an article about a criminal conviction, the writer assumes the reader knows about trials, juries, and criminal activity. The Narrative Chain project aims to learn this knowledge by processing large amounts of text and learning which events tend to occur together. We are studying not just what can be learned, but also the best representation for this knowledge (graph, linear chain, frame?).

This project also includes research into ordering events in time. For instance, did the conviction or the sentencing happen first? We use modern machine learning techniques to find linguistic features that indicate this semantic ordering relation.

An example of a learned narrative event chain, with arrows indicating temporal ordering, is shown on the right. The bold words are the events, and the subj/obj terms indicate how the common actor in this narrative is involved in the event (the subject or object of the verb).

The amount of literary material available on-line keeps growing rapidly. Not only are there machine-readable texts in libraries, collections and e-book stores, but there is also more and more “live” literature – e-zines, blogs, self-published e-books and so on. There is a need for tools to help users navigate, visualize and appreciate high volume of available literature.

Literary texts are quite different from technical and formal documents, which have been the focus of NLP research thus far. Most forms of statistical language processing rely on lexical information in one way or another. In literature, the primary mode is narrative rather than exposition. Stories may be cognitively easier to read than certain expository genres, such as scientific documents, but it is a challenging form of discourse for NLP tools and methods. For instance, literary prose lacks overt lexical clues and structural markers typically leveraged in the processing of more structured genres. Also, even conventional literary texts exhibit far less unity of time, space and topic than most formal discourse. Learning to handle these challenges in literary data may help move past heavy reliance on surface clues in general.

Literature also differs from other genres because of the needs of its typical audience. For instance, reading, searching or browsing literature online is a different task than searching for the latest news on a particular topic. Search criteria would be rather abstract: not a keyword, but a literary style, similarity to another work, point of view and so on. When looking for a summary or a digest, a reader may prefer to know or visualize a text's broad characteristics than facts which summarize the plot.

We invite papers that touch upon these areas, but also welcome other ideas which promote the processing of literary narrative or related forms of discourse.

The “Folktales and Facets” project proposes ways to enhance access to folktales—in written and audiovisual formats—through the systematic and rigorous development of user-focused and task-focused models of information representation. Methods used include cognitive task analysis and facet analysis to better understand the information-seeking and information-use practices of people working with folktales and the intellectual dimensions of the domain. Interviews were conducted with 9 informants, representing scholars, storytellers, and teachers who rely on folktales in their professional lives to determine common tasks across user groups. Four tasks were identified: collect, create, instruct, and study. Facet analysis was conducted on the transcripts of these interviews, and a representative set of literature that included subject indexing material and a random stratified set of document surrogates drawn from a collection of folktales, including bibliographic records, introductions, reviews, tables of contents, and bibliographies. Eight facets were identified as most salient for this group of users: agent, association, context, documentation, location, subject, time, and viewpoint. Implications include the need for systems designers to devise methods for harvesting and integrating extant contextual material into search and discovery systems, and to take into account user-desired features in the development of enhanced services for digital repositories.

Information is costly to manipulate and retrieve. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. We have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world. They help build in our mind an idea. And that’s what true narratives do. They don’t just paint pictures they build structures in our mind upon which logic is built.

The obvious question is how one manages to distinguish among summary, analysis, argument, and interpretation. E.g.

With the aid of a rag tag crew of adventurers, a young man rescues a princess from an evil empire and discovers his destiny to become a member of a dying order of knights.

A young man helps a rebel leader escape from an imperial prison and participates in an pitched battle to save the rebels' military base.

I assume you recognize the story, and I think most people would say the first summary is more accurate. Why? The second one is certainly not inaccurate. It simply downplays the "hero's journey" aspect and portrays the film as depicting a political and collective activity.

We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. But there’s a problem with working this way: it’s not at all how people experience the product in real life. People use products in little flows that last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

A user might first notice your product in a search result, browse around the product for a minute, and then leave. They might come back, sign up, and then leave again. They might open an email from the product, come back, make a purchase, and leave. Each of these little stories is a way that people actually experience your product.

We too often insist on a single, correct understanding of an event, or of the past. Instead, a richer history would included a heterogeneity of interpretations, the diversity of practices, the contestations, and the processes and negotiations by which people have dealt with such differences–turbulence. Digital media presents us with an opportunity to use tools that facilitate more complex, not complicated, narratives and stories of the past and how they continue to operate in our present. By bringing out such variability, we can show more of the operations of history, the stories embedded in primary data and the negotiations and decisions that lead to the structures, ideas, and social forms of our narratives.

Computational processes generate lists: lists of numbers, lists of words, lists of coordinates, lists of properties. We transform these lists into more exalted forms -- visualizations, maps, information systems, software tools -- but the list remains the fundamental data structure of computing, from which most other structures are derived. Whenever we treat the world as data, we are nearly always creating lists. But what sort of *texts* are these, and can we consider them the same way that we consider other texts within the humanities? In this paper, I offer some meditations on the nature of lists, and suggest that it is the paucity of information they provide -- and the ways in which that paucity licenses narrative and explanation -- that allows us to imagine computational representations as texts that can play a fruitful role in the wider context of humanistic inquiry.

He is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.

Inspired by Vygotsky (1978, 1986) and Luria (1976), Wertsch (2002, 2008, 2009) claims that textual resources (e.g. narratives in textbooks about a collective past) function as mediators between the historical events and our understanding of those events. These narrative resources are schematic templates deeply embedded in socio-cultural frameworks. These schematic templates function to organize specific narratives according to abstract categories. Hence, abstract structures can underlie an entire set of specific narratives, each of which has a particular setting, cast of characters, dates, and so forth (Wertsch, 2009:129). The schematic narrative templates are specific to particular narrative traditions which can be expected to differ from one socio-cultural setting to another (Wertsch, 2009: 129). For this perspective, human action implies a tension between actors and cultural tools such as language and narrative texts. Therefore, cultural tools do not mechanically determine people’s behavior, although it is crucial to acknowledge the strong influence that they have.

The issue 14 of Discursos del Caos presents a special broadcast, which consists of the conversation among researchers Rolf Zwaan and Teun van Dijk, who discuss about cognitive processes and mental representations and the role of these in the field of discourse production and comprehension. Among other topics, talk about the situation models, the notion of affordances and cognition of narrative texts.

Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation. We focus on “the facts of the case,” as described in a judge’s opinion, and then we describe the way the court applied the law to such facts as doctrine, hardly pausing to note the irony of this ex cathedra image, smacking of infallibility. Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

Developments in legal scholarship pose a challenge to our continued near-exclusive reliance on a court’s version of the “facts.” The last 20 years have seen a trend toward increased emphasis on “stories” as a feature of legal teaching and scholarship.

I can see that another thing I often do in my courses, particularly thematic classes, is provide a “spine” narrative that supports the discussion. For all that I think “coverage” is an uninteresting objective for a class, I clearly recognize that without some core storyline or knowledge base, a class would be nothing but 14 weeks of “another interesting reading”: fun and diverting, but not giving students any sense of cumulative ownership over the subject, a sense that they know something that can be brought to bear in unexpected and creative ways on later readings (and on later experiences once the class is over).

London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text.

Situation model theories of text comprehension consider temporality to be one of the critical dimensions for building a coherent mental representation of described events. Using this framework, three continuous scale measures were developed to assess temporal coherence based on tense, aspect, and adverbial relations. Experts in discourse processing evaluated 150 texts, excerpted from science, history, and literature textbooks, to establish a gold standard of temporality. We then demonstrated that Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures textual cohesion on over 200 indices of discourse features, could significantly reflect these human interpretations by incorporating five indices of local, temporal cohesion. We conclude our paper with a discussion of our current research into developments of more sophisticated global temporal indices.

Abstract. This paper proposes a corpus-based study of how texts guide readers through time. It focuses on sentence-initial temporal expressions which, beyond locating an event in time, take on a discourse dimension via the process of “indexing”: contrary to connection, which looks backward towards previous text, indexing, also referred to as “discourse framing”, looks forward and provides instructions for the interpretation of forthcoming text. As a first step towards an investigation of the impact of genre on temporal framing, our French language corpus is constructed according to the most crucial distinction regarding temporality: narrative/non-narrative. The non-narrative sub-corpus provides archetypal examples of text organisation through temporal framing. Narrative texts on the other hand, because of the interaction between framing and another major mode of temporal organisation – through the Narration relation – resist the indexing model and therefore force us to refine the notions.

In two experiments we assessed the degree to which memory for events are similar or differ depending on whether they were narrative or autobiographical events. Consistent with previous research on autobiographical memory, memories for events captured the sequential order of events. However, in contrast to autobiographical memory research, ratings of importance did not appear to be related to retrieval speed. An analysis of causal connectivity of the recalled events was significantly related to retrieval speed. Issues of narrative comprehension and memory, autobiographical memory, and their overlap are discussed.

This study examined the forgetting curves for information read in a novel. People read a 10-chapter novel where each chapter covered an approximately 10-year period in the life of the protagonist. After reading the entire novel, participants completed various memory tests in which they summarised the novel, provided associated information from cues, and answered specific questions. Performance was plotted as the amount of information or the accuracy of question answering for each chapter. All of the memory tests revealed similar patterns: (a) better performance for early information (a primacy effect), (b) a bump in performance when the protagonist was approximately 20 years old, and (c) a smaller bump in performance when the protagonist began a career later in life. These results are considered in the context of theories of forgetting, autobiographical memory, and situation models.

There are also a number of potential applications to information technology. Interfaces designed to teach procedures or scientific processes may benefit from explicitly representing the event structure of the activity for the learner (Zacks & Tversky, 2003). Psychologically adaptive segmentation may provide an efficient way of summarizing large databases of video or multimedia for search and editing (Christoffersen, Woods, & Blike, 2007). Identifying event boundaries may be helpful in scheduling interruptions in the context of tasks such as piloting, driving, or operating machinery.
Finally, event segmentation may provide a powerful lens through which to view art and literature. One important thing that cinema, television, and literature do is represent events. Some basic features of these ubiquitous media are still poorly understood. For example, how is it possible that a film can cut from one time and place to another, instantaneously changing all the information in the visual field, without disorienting the viewer (Münsterberg & Griffith, 1916/1970)? One possibility is that the perception of events regulates how cuts are perceived and which sorts of cuts “work” (Zacks & Magliano, in press). What does a reader retain over the reading of an extended novel (Copeland, Radvansky, & Goodwin, 2009; Radvansky, Copeland, & Zwaan, 2005)? The behavioral and neurophysiological data suggest that readers construct event representations that are segmented according to the same mechanisms as govern the segmentation of live action (Speer et al., 2009; Zacks et al., 2009). Thus, the chunking of experience into events may enable disparate artistic forms to convey experience.

When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading.

Melanie C. Green is a social psychologist whose research has focused on the power of narrative to change beliefs, including the effects of fictional stories on real-world attitudes. Her theory of "transportation into a narrative world" focuses on immersion into a story as a mechanism of narrative influence. Dr. Green has examined narrative persuasion in a variety of contexts, from health communication to social issues.

Linked Data is Storytelling 101 for computers. It doesn’t have the full richness, complexity and nuance that we invest in our narratives, but it does at least help computers to fit all the bits together in meaningful ways. And if we talk nice to them, then they can apply their newly-acquired interpretative skills to the things that they’re already good at — like searching, aggregating, or generating the sorts of big pictures that enable us to explore the contexts of our stories.

Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to address key, fundamental questions about narrative, using computational techniques, so to advance our understanding of cognition, culture, and society.

New media offer an unprecedented opportunity to revise our literary economy. One crucial anxiety is that we be able to find (and to publish) good work of local or specific importance, since much human knowledge is not popular. Small, low-traffic sites are thus of considerable interest to the health of the Web, though individually these sites possess small economic leverage. The challenge these sites face is increased by the noisiness of web traffic; herds, flocks, and cadres of narrative-driven fans can all increase traffic one day and eliminate it another. For large sites, this poses no problem, but for smaller sites this granularity, combined with the zero lower bound, can have catastrophic consequences both for individual publications and for the overall shape of the Web.

In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, Snyder argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think “the war” was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.

Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography.

The living handbook of narratology (LHN) is based on the Handbook of Narratology first published by Walter de Gruyter in 2009. As an open access publication it makes available all of the 32 articles contained in the original print version

Whilst we have the luxury of open APIs to services, it’s rarely rich enough data for interesting stories to be told. APIs tend to be locked in the present – as the present is what a lot of services are fixated on. Use, not stories. Some element of time is normally needed to pull out data that tells interesting stories, often long periods of time.

People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative.

Lives are not actually lived in arcs, and where they are, you can be certain that there is either a wannabe novelist or a political agenda lurking in the mental shallows.

The Story Drifter is a tool that allows a person or a group of people to construct a non-linear narrative based on the context of an event and its connections with surrounding information. Our proposed tool uses stories, photos, videos, historical artifacts, names, dates, and anything else that could help to illustrate not only what happened, but why it happened.

When we read a novel, watch a play or a film, listen to a concerto, or read a historical narrative, we are not just attending to the moment but forming expectations about what will come next. Comparing our anticipation with the actual unfurling of the work or the sequence of arguments is part of the distinctive pleasure we take in such activities, and that pleasure keeps us returning for more. Such anticipatory or projective retrospection always involves speculation or guesswork, for every piece is unique. But being able to engage in such anticipation is an essential part of general intelligence, and developing that ability is one of the primary goals of teaching in the humanities.

it is important to consider the ways in which digitalization affects how biographical or narrative research can be conducted.

"...even if web of data turns out to be all its proponents want it to be, narrative won’t still be part of it, but it will be something to put on top." Problematic assumption that facts precede narratives, that narratives are something you "put on top" of or weave out of facts or data... rather than facts being distilled from or abstracted out of narratives.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters.

In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world.

Unless and until some deal can be worked out for digital rights to images, the focus of the digital library is limited to text—just as we enter the golden age of visual narration.

Catalogue of medieval Irish narratives & literary enumerations.

Updating Dostoevsky’s mystical fable to a future, Fox network style reality. Public Eye Films partnered with Cruxy.com to expand the possibilities for online distribution and to create new user interfaces for hyperlinked entertainment.

Since stories are so powerful by virtue of the fact that their "meaning" is open-ended—very much in the eyes of the beholder—we are interested in how stories might be indexed on the Web.

The research described here aims at building time-varying 3D models that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time.

The first 24x7 coverage of a global sporting event using the internet. The media generated by the boats in their race around the world—emails, photos, videos, position data—was used for data-driven storytelling.

I-School professor whose research includes event gazetteers, narrative structures, and news archives.

It The BBC is well placed to try and weave the explosion of personal content into a comprehensive narrative that mixes the best of the BBC's archived output with the best of the collective memory and 'citizen history' that they can tap into.

Create multi-page stories, drag and drop clip art to illustrate your story, add text in dialog boxes, create storytelling clubs with your friends, share your stories with others.

Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel.

The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) offers a course of study designed for a small group of dedicated students with a passion and appreciation for graphic novels, storytelling, writing, comics, and design.

This class deals with ways people have developed for telling others what they think they know, what their research or investigation has revealed to them about society, social life, and social problems. It thus has to do with problems of what has been call

Scans of Mexican fotonovela, or photo comics.

Sites documenting the changes made to various anime series when they were exported to the US.

Mamet couldn't write dialog like this.

Let's explore narrative archeology and place-based storytelling/learning as it begins to find form through emerging technologies.

MemoryMiner is an application used to organize and share digital media using a simple, yet powerful metaphor, namely "People, Places and Time."

Senior principal scientist in MITRE’s Center for Information Technology, looking at how to use narrative to present information effectively.

The architecture of the narrative present in the movie "Fight Club", completely built with Lego blocks.

Enjoy amazing, super sharp photos from some of the world's finest photographers, along with full story captions, delivered right to your desktop.

Story-sharing using instant messengers, VOIP, and image sharing applications.

The tools for great storytelling are all around us and they come with a built-in forum and audience.

The project explores how people – youth in particular – use self-representation in digital storytelling to shape and share their lives, and tries to understand these processes through theories of mediation and mediatization across media studies and th

The company is working on a cross between a narrative video production and an online game: Consumers will be able to view regularly updated video clips and try to solve online puzzles about the fugitive's real-world location.

The dangers of crossing storytelling modalities: good blogger != good filmmaker.

Maps different Brazilian cities by urban interventions that aim to interfere at the current Brazilian mediascape, reappropriating technology to reveal places, people and their tales.

Made-for-file-sharers video series.

Users can organize their pictures into linear “photo-arcs” connected by textual narratives. Users can also view other narratives that use the same pictures, or perhaps similar pictures, which introduce a non-linear, interactive element.

Games and Resources on Storytelling Games and Improvisational Storytelling; Card Games, Board Games, and Role-Playing.

THEN is a peer-reviewed journal that takes a humanities-based approach to research on technology in education.

mo:life aims to map the convergence of film, television, mobile, and the internet, and explore how the integration of these formats and networks can enable new narrative straits - new ways of telling stories.

An emerging exploration of new applications of markup and computational linguistic technology to the study of Scripture, with an emphasis on practical tools that encourage understanding and personal transformation.

If future personal digital collections have real breadth and depth, then tools supporting the overlay of specific views into that material and narrative creation will have critical importance.

This community is for the promotion of Character Role Play games, games based on literary works, movies, TV shows, historical events, or original creations In which the members play as the characters of that particular genre.

By making initial "entrance" posts and allowing any and all other characters to respond as the inclination strikes them, Milliways Bar is enabling a kind of collaborative storytelling.

StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family.

Instinct Corporation, based in the Silicon Valley, is the leading educational software company focusing exclusively on developing communication skills through story telling and movie making.

NM2 is about creating a new media genre using all of the facilities of modern broadband communication and interactive terminals. Its total budget is about 7.5 Million Euro.

What if the same kind of browser-based administrative tools that are used to easily update collections could be modified to enable museum staff to curate, annotate, paginate and publish custom collections?

The Center for Digital Storytelling is a non-profit project development, training, and research organization dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives.

An account of using narrative to structure the design of a website. Interesting bibliography.

Two-minute movies, written, performed, edited and directed by the storytellers themselves.

A peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.